Archive for the ‘Irish’ Category

Usual Suspects star Gabriel Byrne has gone to war on “dumbos” who want to block the view from his luxury New York apartment. Byrne, 58, lives with his two kids Jack and Romy in a gigantic brownstone apartment in Brooklyn, New York, and is just a stone’s throw from the Broadway theatres where he performs and the set of his US television show, In Treatment.

But developers have announced plans to erect a giant skyscraper in the area where he lives which is affectionately known as “DUMBO” – short for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. Dubliner Byrne believe the 18-storey building will block beautiful views of the Brooklyn Bridge and just doesn’t fit the community of converted four- and five-storey warehouses.

Raged Byrne: “This huge building will dwarf the bridge on the Brooklyn side, causing irreparable damage to the bridge’s singular and majestic presence.” He submitted his bitter objections to a city planning meeting last week.

Telly shrink Gabriel Byrne recently found himself an unpaid job – teaching Frasier’s crusty old dad to sound more Irish. Byrne, who plays a psychiatrist in edgy series In Treatment, stepped in to help when his veteran co-star John Mahoney was cast in Colin McPherson‘s play “The Seafarer,” on Broadway.

Mahoney (pictured above) – best known for playing the grumpy dad in another TV shrink show, Frasier – is a proud Irish American himself but he had no idea how to do a Dublin accent. In between takes for In Treatment, Mahoney would chat with Dublin-born Byrne paying close attention to the lilt of his voice. Byrne even taped himself reading lines from Mahoney’s script of “The Seafarer.”

“I have a lot of Irish in me but this really helps,” says Mahoney, who was born in England and had an Irish grandfather but lost his accent when he emigrated to the US. Referring to his role in the play, at New York’s Steppenwolf Theatre, Mahoney says: “I play a filthy old drunk, recently blind, chronically hung over.

A blockbuster wartime bio-pic faces the axe – after it was revealed the New Yorker who wrote it made the whole story up! Oscar winner Richard Dreyfuss and Irish starlet Sarah Bolger were set to make “The Fence” – based on an autobiography by Herman Rosenblat.

In the movie, Dublin-born beauty Bolger plays Roma, a young girl who forms a bond with teenage Nazi concentration camp victim Rosenblat after she keeps him alive by tossing him breadcrumbs and apples over the barbed wire fence.

However, Rosenblat, who went on to marry Roma following a chance meeting years later in New York, has now shockingly confessed he concocted the information in his book, “Angel at the Fence: The True Story of a Love that Survived.”

Retired New York telly repairman Herman, whose bogus story has now been scrapped by publishers, apologised this week, saying: “I wanted to bring happiness to people, to remind them not to hate, but to love and tolerate all people. I brought good feelings to a lot of people and I brought hope to many. My motivation was to make good in this world. In my dreams, Roma will always throw me an apple, but I now know it is only a dream.”

Even chat show queen Oprah Winfrey was taken in by the hoax. Oprah who hosted Rosenblat and his wife, Roma Radzicki Rosenblat, on her show twice, called their romance “the single greatest love story” she had encountered in her 22 years on the show.

He’s been on our screens for five decades – but Irish actor Stephen Rea says the characters he plays never gets any nookie! The closest he came to getting lucky was in his Oscar-nominated movie The Crying Game and the female ‘love interest’ in that film turned out to be a cross-dressing MAN!

However, Rea – one of the busiest stars in Hollywood – claims he is happy never getting the girl. “Can you imagine having to do all that sex in a film?” says 62-year-old Rea. “Sex in movies is not fun. There’s a lot of people watching, your butt is in the air, it’s not the most fun. You will be much happier if you don’t see my butt in the air, believe me.”

Foul-mouthed funny man Denis Leary shocked fellow celebrities this week by poking fun at Ricky Martin, Britney Spears and David Duchovny. And Leary – whose parents John and Nora both emigrated to America from Killarney – might now consider going back there for good, given the hostile reception he got for his cheeky wisecracks.

Leary, who was hosting the Fashion Rocks awards in New York, drew embarrassed titters as he repeatedly sniped at Spears and Duchovny. In one barb, Leary quipped: “Britney Spears will not be here tonight but we’re gonna do a little Britney tribute later on. I’m gonna chug a bottle of NyQuil (cold medicine), do seven shots of vodka, shave my head and make out with members of the paparazzi.”

But he saved his crudest joke for pop star Martin, who has been plagued with rumours about his sexuality, even though he recently had two kids to a surrogate mum. “Ricky Martin will not be here tonight,” Leary said. “He just had twins today. Surrogate mum. Yeah, they had to do it that way because babies don’t come out of other men’s arses!”

It seems to be a year for Leary to bite the hand that feeds him – he has also written a book called Why We Suck in which he brands Americans “fat, lazy and stupid.” In one extract, Leary rages: “I’m sick of low esteem and fake fat-suit-wearing female talk-show hosts and extreme makeovers and steroid-laden home run hitters and Reese Witherspoon movies and Paris Hilton‘s himbo boyfriends and celebrity rehab and Dr. Phil.”

Irish stand-up comic Fiona Walsh was so self-conscious about not having gleaming white American teeth – that she turned her torment into a Broadway play. Tipperary-born Walsh grew up watching telly shows like Marcus Welby MD and the Incredible Hulk in which all the stars had impossibly bleached teeth.

And funny woman Fiona, whose one woman show Great White American Teeth debuts at New York’s First Irish Theatre Festival this month, has successfully used her own angst about being born with typical European gnashers into a critically-acclaimed play. “I had my own teeth straightened after years of agents pointing out that I had an unmarketable gap,” explains Fiona, whose play will be showcased in Belfast next year. “I wore a brace for over a year and still have a retainer – how ‘Yankee’ is that?

The move seems to have helped because, as well as her stage show, Fiona will soon be filming a movie about Irish immigrants called Paddyville in New York with Irish American hunk Aidan Quinn.

You’d have to be tough or insane to try to beat up acting giant Liam Neeson – but that doesn’t stop his wife Natasha Richardson from thinking it happens all the time. Strapping Schindler’s List star Neeson, who measures 6ft 4in, keeps coming home with bruises and has a hard job persuading Natasha he’s just injured himself on the movie set.

New York-based Liam, 56, worried Richardson more than ever during the shooting of his new movie Taken, in which his character pursues a group of kidnappers who have snatched his daughter. The Oscar-nominated actor was required to undergo intense fighting training which left him covered from head to foot in bruises.

“I keep pretty fit, but I had to crank up the level and intensity of my training,” explains Liam, who lives in the Big Apple with Natasha and his kids. “I had to get together with a couple of guys in Paris and learn these different fight techniques known as ‘parkour’ which we had to keep doing it for weeks because there was so many complex fighting sequences. Every time I saw my wife she thought I’d been beaten up literally, and of course I had.”

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